Sunday, September 27, 2015

Gathering Eggs: An Interview with Poet Randy Roark by Kirpal Gordon, Part 2

Kirpal Gordon:
Your experience of Allen Ginsberg reading Reznikoff to you feels like a lineage
revelation moment and reminds me of a journal excerpt in your aptly titled
travel book, What I Have Become: “When I’m traveling alone and with no
obligations—just anonymously moving without agenda and on my own through a city
I’ve never been in before, there’s usually a moment when I move ‘inside’ the
place, which is like what I imagine walking inside a mirror might be like. I am
no longer in the place, but of the place.” You also write, “I think those who
really love Rilke are those who have some part of them that only comes to life
when they’re alone, something that would cease to exist if it was shared.”
Especially in your travel books which bounce back and forth between the zones
of solitude and society, you seem also to bounce back and forth between the
genres of poetry and prose. For example, from What I Have Become (2007):

He Begins to Enumerate How Things Are and Why

I don’t understand anything that does not whirl and spin

like the burning books in the bonfire scene of “Orphee”—

how Eurydice’s dress is the same blue as their bindings,

the same blue as her eyes, the same blueness in her hair.

How it’s sometimes enough just to write these words

in my head, since I only dream there is some connection

between my memories and experiences, and what I really

want is to write a text transmitting the things themselves—

to say this and then that like a calculating machine

until it all returns to zero—the way leaves turn black

and fall off their dark branches and are swept away

by October’s smoky wind, in Nature’s sleight of hand—

her now you see it, now what’s happened kind of way—

the way the moon’s venetian fingers cut into the room’s

deep shadows until then night is visual beyond all that’s

seen, as my nerves light up my brain, illuminate the page—

the way light enters a room and wanders without haste,

uncovering the details of what I will remember of tonight.

RR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That style began with DODO—the transcription of some of
notebooks from my first seven-month solo trip to Europe, July
1990 through January 1991. And it got even more severe in San Francisco Notebook. In that one there are even poems that just stop and
there’s a seemingly unrelated piece of prose, and then the poem continues as if
it hasn’t been interrupted. I got that form by reproducing the order in which
everything was written. It’s evidence that the mind is discontinuous. It’s
evidence of the evolution of thought and impressions, of memory, of changes through
time, of repeating themes like in music, popping up in different contexts, the
way some part of my brain is always working on stuff below my level of
awareness.

And I also try to recognize every form of writing that I
become aware of, in the order of its appearance. So there might be the tone of a
mini-essay, followed by a conversation between me and a stranger, followed by a
letter to an old girlfriend, followed by a piece of overheard conversation and
something I remember and something from my reading and something I saw and
something I thought and … you know, all of it, tumbling together, just like
real life. I want to give a sense of the all-ness of consciousness and its
co-dependent origin. Because a book of poems is not like life. Life is not like
a collection of essays or even a novel. Life is messier than a biography. Life
is made up of a letter, a photograph, a shopping list, an e-mail, a phonecall,
all of it. I want to focus on this constant process of changing focus the way I
experience it in my daily life, the way Joyce revealed the inner monologue, or
Freud revealed the unconscious, or the Impressionists taught us how to see
light as well as objects, the way Kerouac will continue to inspire future
generations to set off on their own rumspringas.

KG: You speak a
lot about the need to have courage, which you certainly manifest plenty of in
your travels. I am also intrigued by your chutzpah. What was it like conversing
with Pound’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz and his lover Olga Rudge?

RR: In 1990, Diane di Prima called Julia Connor, who was
hosting a Cantos reading group I was
involved with in Boulder. She said she’d just learned about a program sponsored by
the University of New
Orleans where
students could go and study Pound in his daughter’s castle in Dorf Tirol, Italy, where Pound spent the last years of his life. That’s
where Olga and Mary still lived, along with Mary’s son, in a castle belonging
to the Rachewiltz’s—the family Mary married into. Mary’s husband Boris was a
prince and rarely home. I can remember one evening the excitement of the
housekeepers and Mary, trying to get the house ready for one of the prince’s
infrequent returns.

Mary vehemently defended her father. She seemed to have
given her whole life to defending her father’s legacy. Olga and Mary argued a
lot. Olga was over 90 and slept most of the time.

One of the most interesting things Mary said was that the
silence that everyone talks about in Pound’s last years was actually much more importantly
in evidence in the years he spent giving his voice over to the Adams letters
and Chinese history.

There were only eight students in our group. John Gery, of
the University of New
Orleans, was our
teacher. One was a young woman from China who had never been out of her country. I found her
interest in Pound surprising, but she was the one who really understood the Chinese
cantos, how Pound was selecting from the full story to tell a very idiosyncratic
version of Chinese history. One of the students has remained a friend for 25
years now, the author of the definitive history of Harlemfor Grove Press,
Jonathan Gill.

The students slept in an outbuilding and we’d meet for
classes during the day in what was left of Pound’s library. Over the four
weeks, we read all of Pound’s poetry including the Cantos and a big chunk of his criticism. In the evenings I would
read the Cantos aloud with whomever was interested. It’s one of my favorite
accomplishments, hearing the entire work read aloud.

Pound made the bookshelves of his library. There were two rows—each about
twelve feet wide and maybe ten feet high, and they were several rows deep.
There was a huge American flag hanging as a kind of dust covering over one of
the shelves, and around the walls were displayed Pound’s tennis racquets and
photos and some furniture he made.

In Pound’s study I found Pound’s source for the Chinese
cantos—a multiple-volume history of China written in French and bound in red leather. You could see
Pound’s handwritten pencil markings on the endpapers, mostly page references. I
also found Pound’s blue-bound first edition of Ulysses, with Joyce’s tiny handwriting thanking Pound for helping
to get it published. We went to Venice over a long weekend and tracked down where Pound lived and
many of the references in his poems.

One of the most amazing things for me about Dorf Tirol is
that it’s on a mountainside above the city of Bolzano, which has a spa that’s been active at least since the 15th
century. Kafka came to recuperate from tuberculosis at the spa in 1914. From
the spa you can easily see Schloss Tirol—the Tirolian Castle—on the top of the
mountain, directly above BrunnenbergCastle. The trail that goes to the two castles travels through
tiered grapevines, and it has severe and very long and winding switchbacks. I
decided to walk to Schloss Tirol from BrunnenbergCastle, which seemed close enough to reach in about half an hour.
But, after half a day of walking, I seemed to be no closer. I spent more than
half of my time walking away from the castle, often out of sight of the castle
completely. Or the path would suddenly head upward and I’d get excited—yes, I’m
definitely getting closer—and then the path would plunge down and away from the
castle and I would seem to be farther away than ever, and continuing to move
even farther away. Anyone who’s read The
Castle knows what I’m talking about.

KP: What of your
Yeats-Pound ruminations at Stone Cottage where Yeats’ Silentia Lunae and A
Vision were born? I ask after the latter
work particularly as it’s one of the strangest honeymoon accounts ever written.
The notion that astral guides had come to give Yeats metaphors for his poetry
strikes me as the kind of non-fiction you could relate to as an author. Your
earlier remarks on your “anima mundi” experience with your neck (The
Convalescence Notebook, 2008) suggested
as much.

RR: When I write about some of the weirdo things that have
happened to me, I feel a need to focus precisely on the facts—on what happened
and what I remember—and not draw any conclusions. That explains The Convalescence Notebook. I wrote that
whole book as the events were unfolding, so all of the details are there. But I’m
not about to make any great claims because I don’t understand the whys or the
hows. I’m just going to be grateful to whatever forces are protecting me and
making decisions for me. My entire life—all of it—is by their efforts and
grace. If it was all up to me, my life would have been over long ago. I’ve
definitely lucked out in the guardian angel department.

Anyway, in order to be able to graduate on schedule for my
MFA at Naropa, I had to write my thesis before I returned home. So after the
Pound studies ended, I took a two-day train trip from Bolzano, in northeastern Italy, to Lisboa, where food and lodging were cheap. I would
spend my days inside the art museums, or wander around town, and in the
evenings I would read and write in my hotel room. That became my pattern for
that whole trip, and most of my future travels as well. I read Joyce in the
evenings and the next day would walk through Dublin to find all the places mentioned in the books. On that
trip alone I read Flaubert in Rouen, Proust in Paris, Dante in Florence, the Greek dramatists in the theater at the base of the
Acropolis, Synge on the Aran
Islands, Yeats in Sligo and
Gort, Beckett on the P&O Ferries. When I got home, the woman I was living
with had piled all of the books I had sent home and they were taller than I
was.

I wrote about the relationship between Pound and Yeats at
the Stone Cottage, 1913-1916. Everyone always talks about how Pound modernized
Yeats over those summers—a debt that was acknowledged by Yeats himself—but I
could only find one person who had written about the changes Yeats’ mysticism
and arcane spiritual readings had on Pound. Pound talks about spirits and
sprites and goddesses especially in his last poems, but he always does it in a
context that undermines the otherworldliness that Yeats embraced. For Pound they were no less real, I argued. He
turned them into metaphors and symbols of natural forces, but they’re there.

KG: There it is again: systematizer (Yeats’s spirit world)
and reminder (ol’ Ez’s nature metaphor). If these Modernists could be called
rock stars of their day, how did traveling the British Isles with real rock
stars, Fairport Convention, compare?

This was my first trip to Europe, my
first passport, and I did everything I could because I thought I’d never be
back. After Pound and Portugal, I took a train to London, where I met up with Nancy
Covey—Richard Thompson’s second wife—and a bunch of people for a tour of
England, Scotland, and Wales, ending in Edinburgh and the Fringe Festival,
where Richard Thompson was performing. We began by following the British folk-rock
band Fairport Convention as they prepared for the annual Cropedy Festival. We
also visited other notable British folk-rock musicians, including Robin
Williamson of the Incredible String Band, who played harp for us after dinner
in a 17th-century Welsh manor house; Ian Matthews, Scottish accordionist
Phil Cunningham and Dougie MacLean, a Scots acoustic guitarist. And Mark
Ellington, a British guitarist who guested with Fairport back in the day, but
has since returned to his family’s 16th-century estate in
Aberdeenshire, to assume—as eldest son—the position of Deputy Lieutenant.
Nineteen Ninety was also the 20th anniversary of the Albion Band, so
we spent a day at a ceilieh—a Gaelic
community dance—with Ashley Hutchings as M.C. and the members of the many
manifestations of the Albion Band playing in different configurations. And I
got to hear June Tabor sing in a town hall in the Cotswalds, which was a
highlight.

Richard Thompson joined us for a couple of
evenings and outings and bus rides. Nancy used to book McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, where she’d once booked Allen Ginsberg, whose singing she
declared was “dreadful”—adding quickly, “But he had a cold.” “Is it true,”
Richard asked me, “that Allen Ginsberg is a hypochondriac?” “Sort of,” I said,
a little taken aback. “But I doubt that’s his defining characteristic.”

KP: And meeting
with James Joyce’s nephew in Dublin? How did that happen?

RR: My original
plan had been to spend a couple of days in Dublin, and then head west to Sligo
and Galway and Gort for an extended study of Yeats in the places where much of
his work was written or written about, but I ended up staying for a couple of
weeks when I unexpectedly met Joyce’s nephew.

On my first day there, I went to the Dublin
tourist agency and saw a postcard advertising walks through Joyce’s Dublin
with his nephew—Ken Monaghan—who was about 50 at the time. This guy was fun,
and funny, and informed, and I’d meet him after his tours for lunch in the
warehouse space he’d rented to keep the holdings of the future James Joyce
Centre. He’d offer me half of his sandwich and I’d offer him half of mine and
he’d give me access to his files in exchange for some company and intelligent
conversation about his uncle’s work.

He led a
90-minute walking tour of downtown Dublin,
pointing out places in Joyce’s life and books. We’d visit the grammar school in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
the post office and the tunnel where Bloom picks up and later reads his love
letter, the general store where he bought some lemon soap. (“Doin’ the tour?” asked
the clerk as he rang up the same brand of lemon soap that Bloom buys in Ulysses.) Davy Byrnes’ Pub is still in
business, and there’s the Ha’Penny Bridge and Gresham Hotel. We went into
Trinity College Library, visited the houses and neighborhoods where Joyce grew
up. We also visited the house where Joyce set “The Dead.” The front of the
house is visible in the exterior shots in John Huston’s film, and since the
short story is also based on a real evening, the door that Joyce opened that
evening, the door he describes in the story, the door we see in the film, and
the door I stood in front of were all the same door.

I found things
in Ken’s files that no biographer at the time had mentioned, including the only
known interview with Joyce. Ken had hundreds of photos, transcripts,
interviews, letters, all haphazardly filed. He even had paintings of Joyce,
dusty and torn and yellowing, propped up against a wall.

Ken’s hope was
to start a museum in Dublin with
his collection, and he eventually did open the James Joyce Centre. I looked it
up on-line just now and the homepage quotes from a Yelp review that says it was
taken over by the city after having been run “haphazardly” by Joyce’s nephew
for its first few years. The Centre’s homepage doesn’t even mention his name.

I read all of
Joyce during the evenings in Dublin
(except Finnegans Wake, which I had
read a couple of months before) and spent my mornings investigating the places
mentioned by Joyce and my afternoons with Ken.

I had always
been afraid of the challenges I expected in Ulysses,
but I loved the book! There were times I was laughing so hard that I was afraid
the people next door would call the front desk. Each chapter in Ulysses is written in a different
literary style and that’s been an influence on The Decalogue too, in that I’m choosing to allow for a variety of
styles and voices as opposed to homogeneity.

I learned
something I’ve never known any Joyce scholar to mention. To the south of the
Liffey is the MortelloTower
where the book begins. MortelloTowers
were built along the seacoasts of the British isles
following the French Revolution.

To the north of
Liffey is the Hill of Howth, where Joyce and Nora Barnacle had sex for the
first time (on June 16th, the date of Ulysses). When I walked to the top of Howth Head, I discovered
there was a MortelloTower
there too, that’s only visible if you climb to the very top. The book ends withMolly masturbating and fantasizing
about the first time she (Nora) and Bloom (Joyce) had sex, in the bushes at the
top of the Howth Head: “yes I said yes I will Yes.” So Ulysses begins and ends at a MortelloTower.

One of my
biggest regrets is that I told Ken—just to make conversation—that William
Burroughs told me that Finnegans Wake
was a writer’s worst nightmare—a masterwork that’s unreadable. And I told him
that Burroughs said the book’s denseness was evidence of the perseveration
common in late-term alcoholism. That really hurt Ken, and I left quickly and
never saw him again, never even to say goodbye or to thank him.

KG: In the books these travel adventures
read like a hybrid vigor uniting the personal, poetic and immediate sensory
take with the longer eye of the scholarly and the historical. The result is
very engaging, but your chutzpah doesn’t end there. You describe real people
and their actual behavior in these scenes—girlfriends, guides, fellow
travelers, literary contemporaries, teachers both alive and dead—as well as in
the poems! You write them into the work with their real names! I wonder if
you’ve taken any flack for that. In fiction one must be always mindful of the
possibility of getting sued, but non-fiction runs the additional risk/challenge
of writing folks from your life that really do need an introduction as to why they
are there.

RR: I can’t be
the only one who writes about his life using real names, but I won’t publish
anything unless I can turn it into literature. That means the people in my
stories are characters who I usually refer to by their first names only. Anything
dodgy gets assigned to someone with a made-up name, and some people I refer to
only by their first initial. Historical personages get their full name if I
think the story is fair and honest. I’m pretty sensitive about not disclosing
personal information. A couple of people I’ve written about don’t think I’ve
been discrete enough. I have other friends and relatives who are upset that I
haven’t written more about the time I’ve spent with them.

The person in my
writing who is most exposed, who is always the butt of the joke, the guy who
gets his comeuppance over and over again, is always me. I tend not to waste
time transcribing my bitterest, angriest writings. If I do, I usually jettison
them pretty early in the editorial process. Maybe it felt good writing them
down, but it doesn’t feel good typing them or reading them over.

The first memoir
I wrote was the one about apprenticing with Allen that we talked about in the
first part of this interview. That set the template for the rest of my
non-fiction writing. It doesn’t attempt to be impartial—it’s my story, and
Allen is a character in my story.I was
worried before it was published because not all of it was complimentary, but
Allen never complained about anything I wrote about him, and that made me even
bolder.

I have had exes
complain about some of my published writings. I even got fired once because of
something I’d written. Interviews have caused me problems as well. The woman I
identify as Xi in The Decalogue
sometimes says in response to one of my columns “I don’t remember that” or “I
remember it differently.”

KG:
What of writing a celebrity or literary figure into the work that a reader
might have some (mis)information on? Is there a public self and a private self
and is a writer obliged to protect and not expose real people’s behavior or
their web of relationships? What, for example, should a reader make of “for
Anne Waldman/My muse since 1977” to introduce The San Francisco Notebook or “For My Daughter Maelle”/“And for anyone
else I’ve damaged or taken advantage of in an attempt to get out” on the
dedication page of Awakening Osiris?

RR: I think an
undedicated book is a missed opportunity to acknowledge someone still alive, or
to bring to mind someone who is here no longer.

The San Francisco Notebook was written
on a visit to perform at Philip Whalen’s memorial reading, and I’m almost
certain it’s Anne who got me invited, because she couldn’t make it. So, in my
dedication I’m acknowledging to myself and Anne that this book comes from her
efforts to get me invited. The muse part acknowledges that I came to Boulder
because of an article I read about her in 1977.

My daughter is a
more complicated situation. We’ve had no contact since she graduated high
school. That’s her choice, not mine. I partially see my work like the diaries
of Anais Nin, which she wrote so her absent father would know what happened
while he was away. My work is partially a father writing to his absent
daughter, so that if she wants to get to know him some day, she can.

KP: Sometimes I am not sure if the motive is
to underline that it’s true, it happened just like this or if the scaffolding
of dedications, lit quotes at the top of poems and words from and references to
these “characters” is an attempt to marry narrative non-fiction with poetic
interludes.

RR: What’s
happened since The San Francisco Notebook
is that each “book” of mine is usually a document of a particular trip or event
or something I’ve been studying. I start each adventure or project with an
empty pocket notebook and I collect written sketches in it, without editing.
When I get home I turn these notes into a manuscript. I see each piece is part of
this larger thing, the book. I literally do not write individual poems any
more.

The quotes are
from my readings at the time—newspapers, books, whatever. I find the quotes to
be distancing devices that locate the book in a larger, impersonal context. It’s also the lineage thing again. It’s
evidence that my sensibility is having a conversation that exists out-of-time. It also gives some insight
into what I was reading at the time.

There are a lot
more quotations—and poetry—in the full manuscript than the excerpts I’ve
published in “Newtopia.” Quotes and poetry don’t work well in the column, but I
most definitely see them as an important part of the larger arc of the complete
text.

I’ve found that
the prose in The Decalogue is generally
more successful than the poetry. That was an eye opener. In Dodo and San Francisco Notebook, for
instance, I think the poetry is stronger than the prose.

The travel
notebooks more or less reflect the order in which the items were written as a
way to capture my awareness’ moving through time. Very much a part of that
design is that each piece is written from a slightly different angle with a
slightly different format and voice. I want it to include as many different
points of view and forms and voices and structures and variety as possible.

When I started,
I had absolutely no idea how long the project would last. I’m surprised I made
it to ten years. When I had a book at the end of the first year that felt
like a real book—with a beginning, middle,
and end—I doubted I’d be able to do it again. After the second year, I relaxed,
and I think it was around the third or fourth year when I felt confident that life
would supply the beginnings, middles, and ends for my books much better than I
could.

I think of The Decalogue as a deck of cards—each
piece standing alone, yet each piece part of a larger constellation or network
when seen from a higher vantage point. Each card a tree in a grove, and the
whole ten-volume collection a forest.

KG:
The Decalogue, begun in 2006 and
displayed at the NewtopiaMagazine.com site, delivers a tangible you-are-there
experience and opens with you in Fez, a city in Morocco perhaps best described
as strange, beautiful. After a short history, you have choice photographs
(objective correlatives) and a wide collection of both local music and
internationally known bandleaders like Fela Kute and King Sunny Ade. There’s an
insightful essay on Yorubaland and its spirit guides, and then it’s on to
Rabat, Casablanca, the Sahara Desert, Ourika Valley and the Marjana Argan
Cooperative with more photos, poems, music, history, conversations and
observations of the local flora and fauna over seven more journal entries. The
North African tour is followed by ten entries on South Africa, including Zambia, Botswana, the Okavonga Delta, the Shona and the
Ngamo, safaris, music and ideas. Next up is six entries on India which include
travel to Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi and Kathmandu, but by the latest entries—six
in China, including Beijing, the Forbidden City and Hong Kong; and two more
from Lhasa, Tibet—it’s clear you have gotten a lot more involved with the
people in the places, most especially your guide, Xi. What was the evolution of
your reportage like from the Morocco entries to your deeper investigations in Tibet? These could all be considered endangered
ancient places, and I wonder if part of the adventure is a kind of time travel
to locales that have resisted the homogenization of culture like in the USA. Is it fair to ask you what have been your
favorite places and where are you headed next?

RR:
The Decalogue has been more or less
my attempt to capture what I want to remember about my trips. My hope is that
it will amount to something when it’s finished. It’s already much more than I
had any reason to expect.

There
is a real desperation in my travels. The world is changing as fast as the
icecaps are melting. I want to see the rawest places as soon as possible. It’s
too late for so much already. In the Sahara desert the
camel-kids have smart phones and Crocs and try to exchange e-mail addresses
with American girls. I’ve been friended on Facebook by kids in an orphanage I
visited in Myanmar.
It’s not that I want to keep these cultures simple so I can feel nostalgic, or
that I think that I’m seeing anything authentic in terms of even a generation
ago, but I enjoy sitting with someone as different from me as possible and finding
out that we share something, even if we don’t speak the same language. It’s
like being with those deaf kids in New London.
I’ve almost always found something that connects us.

My
favorite trip was China
and Tibet,
because that’s where I met Xi. I know it’s popular to hate China
these days, but—not withstanding the government’s treatment of the Tibetan
people and culture, and a great deal of its history under Mao—I came away with a
deep admiration for the country and its people. So much of what I’d been taught
about China
proved untrue. My other favorite trip was going on safari in Africa.
(Not a hunting safari, I might add.)

KG: No other guide or character has appeared
in The Decalogue like Xi. Her own
struggles as a woman and an artist and a thinker seem to mirror the struggles
of the nation she represents while also serving as a mirror upon which your own
struggles as a man-artist-thinker can be better understood.

RR:
The woman I call Xi in the book helped me choose her name. I knew
I’d be writing a lot about her, and a lot of it would be very personal, so I
wanted her approval up front. Her name is pronounced “shee,” and so she becomes
something of the archetype of “girl/woman” in the book. The writings from China
and Tibet currently
unbalance the book, for sure.

I
like your idea about us two mirroring each other. There was definitely a very
deep and lasting connection made. We still write e-mails back and forth. She’s
a wife and mother now, and still working as a tour guide. We’re hoping to meet
up again at some point. I wish I could live as freshly and wisely as she does!

KG: That leads me to bemusement over a
central paradox in your oeuvre. On the one hand, your purposefulness,
dedication to truth, heavy work load, commitment to craft, sequence of
projects, apprenticeship to certain ideals and aesthetics with a sense of
tradition and lineage have paid off. On the other hand, you write poems of such
whimsy and metaphysical wit. For example, from Map of the World (2007):

Man
Must in His Imagination Enter into Death

To
dream of a death within this dream

is
to ascend into the brilliance of the sun

from
where this life and its days are dreams

and
the finite vegetable world a shadow—

and
yet it is also the point through which

the
future and the present plunge into the past.

The
world and time has placed me at their center

to
enjoy and suffer the elements of my dreaming,

this
mystery through which I have become

one
who was born in order to unravel.

RR:
Yeah, you’re right. I guess I’m the purposeful hard worker—dedicated to truth
and committed to craft—who named his production company DADA Productions. And
his publishing company Laocoon Press. And when I was at Naropa I named my
literary magazine FRICTION, because I
wanted to start some. Sure. It’s complicated.

RR:
One of the long poems in Map of the World
is written in what I call “dream language.” I don’t often remember my dreams,
but I did have a dream that I wrote down shortly after we began this interview
that has some interesting things to add to the ideas we’ve discussed above.

In this dream I was trying to contain
everything I knew about poetry in one image. And I said that a poet gathers
eggs—living things not yet born, sheltered in a shell. There are thousands of
eggs, I said, and each one has not only an individual creature inside it, but any
of thousands of species could be inside each one. It could be a bluebird, a
chicken, a crocodile. And the way to find the rarest eggs is to travel farther and
farther away from civilization. And the greatest poets travel the farthest, and
bring back mysterious eggs no human has ever seen before.

Poets gather these eggs and use
them for food. But then five days, fifteen years later, something flies out of
their mouths when they’re sleeping, and when the poet awakes, a whippoorwill or
a dinosaur, a cobra or a condor, is sitting in the room with them, and poets
think it’s something that has landed here, not knowing that it is something
that they themselves have given birth. The lyrics of a song can appear like
that, or a passage in a novel, a film, a painting.

And that’s the poetry of poetry,
really: following a path without really knowing why until you come upon
something of value. Their love transforms what they’ve found into a poem, which
is like another egg—sustenance contained inside a shell. Someday someone will
be hungry, following his or her own mysterious path, and come upon your egg. And
even if you’re long-dead, the living thing inside the shell comes to life again
in a way you couldn’t have imagined, like
Allen reading Reznikoff’s poetry to me as his apprentice. That’s how poets keep
the world alive, even without knowing it.